The United States [indiscernible] and so are our champion sponsors , the costar group and the john center. [applause] and, we have many friends, and Media Partners and exhibitors. [applause] now, the National Book festival is and has been one of the most inspirational free events in the Nations Capital and it is only possible because of you, our sponsors. And it does take a village to put on a festival like this, so i want to acknowledge the more than 1000 volunteers, most especially the Junior League of washington. [cheers and applause] which has supported the festival since 2003 with over 40,000 hours, the equivalent of 2. 4 million of time. Thank you. [cheers and applause] and, hundreds of volunteers from the general public, and of course, the hardworking library of Congress Staff who are key in vital to the success of the festival, so please, thank them and join me in that. [cheers and applause] some now it is my honor to welcome the chair of the James Madison council and the cochair of the 2020 three National Book festival 2023 National Book festival, mr. David rubinstein. [applause] david so, thank you all for coming and thank you carla, for the kind introduction, and i should say as well that carlas mother is here. Thank you very much for coming from baltimore. [applause] so, how many people here have read at least five books in the past year. Ok, how may people have read at least 10 books in the past year. How many people have read at least 20 books. How any people have read at least 30 books in the last year. Oh well. How many people honestly read 50 books . Anybody read 70 books last year . Ok. Anybody read 100 books last year . Ok. [indiscernible] [distorted audio] [indiscernible] so, sadly, 44 of americans did not read a book last year. 44 of American Adults did not read a single book last year. Now, that is not a good thing for our country. Our country is not the leading country in the world and literacy. In fact, we are 150th in the worlds literacy percentage. 150th. Why is that . There are lots of reasons and we cannot describe them all now but it is a sad fact we are not very good and literacy. People who can, choose often not to read books and people who cant read cant do very much about it. 130 million adults in this country cannot read a book to their children. One of the best ways to teach a child how to read is to read to the child yourself, and that is how many children no doubt many of you learn how to read books. 130 million americans cannot do it. 21 of all adults in this country are functionally illiterate, 21 , which means they cannot read past the fourth grade level, so 21 of americans cannot, essentially at all, so what does this mean for our society . Of course it does not help you get a job if you cannot, and it turns out you are going to be very involved in the criminal Justice System if you cant read. 85 of people in the juvenile delinquency system in this country are functionally illiterate, which means they cannot read past the fourth grade level. Two thirds of the people in the federal prison system are functioning illiterate, so obviously if you are functionally illiterate you probably resort to things that are not great things for our society and as a result often wind up in the juvenile delinquency system or federal prison system, so we have to do much more about this. In notebook festival will solve all these problems im up at National Book festival is designed to make people realize that we in washington dc and representing all of the country believe that it is orton to have a festival where the leading authors in the country, to meet with children, to autograph their books, to read from their books on to explain the importance of reading. It is not called the National Tweet festival or National Memo festival. Its called the National Book festival. Why is that . Books have the way of focusing the way a tweet doesnt, or maybe it is x now, i dont know. [laughter] books of the way of focusing the brain because you have to spend time and be concentrating for some time to read a book and that really helps the brain evolve, and really, all civilization has evolved from reading not just tweets, but books so what we are trying to do at the National Book festival is to say that people come here. It is for free. Come here and meet the great authors and learned more about books and bring your children so they can see how important it is to adults to have other people, and also we want people to come here to because we want people to appreciate the importance of reading. We will not solve the illiteracy problem in this country overnight and we will not solve the other problem which is you can, but you choose not to but we can take a step forward and hopefully people will come here and go back to their home towns, go back to their communities in the Washington Area and say, i was at the National Book festival and i learned something about reading and now i really want to do more to help my child learn how to read better and to read better and more myself, so i want to thank all the sponsors. I want to thank the authors. And i also want to thank laura bush. Those of you who heard the story a moment ago [applause] um, as you all know, uh, we are getting ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country. You would be under a rock if you did not know we work celebrating the 250th anniversary because were celebrating it already, but were not celebrating the 250th anniversary of the National Book festival. Why is that . We did not have a National Book festival for a long time. When laura bush, a librarian, came to washington right before the inauguration, she met with carlas predecessor and a reception the night before the inauguration she said to jim billington, well, we have a textbook festival and you have a book thats when washington and he quickly said, nope, but we will him and we did. So on the mall, right afterwards with that spring i believe it was, they set up the first National Book festival on the mall. Number . . It was a little dusty from time to time and sometimes it rained from time to time but that actually was the first effort of the United States government really to do something along the lines of having a book festival, and so, over the years, the way the world work sometimes his things happened by happenstance and you dont think it is going to be good but it turns out it is actually better, so for a while, the National Park service said, you guys, its nice you are reading books encouraging people to read but youre hurting the grass. [laughter] what . Yes, the grass cant grow with the book has appeared yeah, but people can read better. But yeah, the grass will not grow, so we kind of got kicked off the mall for a while and we went to the Convention Center, which was supposed to be temporary as the grass grew back. [laughter] but ultimately we decided it was better at the Convention Center, so all of you who have been at the mall and all of you have been at the Convention Center know that its better the Convention Center, food, the restrooms are better, so how many people would prefer to stay there, most people . Ok. So that is what we would do tomorrow and i hope all of you will have an enjoyable time and i just want to echo what i said earlier. I think all of you for participating. Hopefully you will take the word back about with the book festival is all about and encourage more people to learn how to read books. And let me thank carla hayden because she has been an indefatigable authors supporting the National Book festival. Its not a given requirement that the library of congress has to support the book festival but she has taken this on and made an incredible book festival, the biggest in the nine states, and i want to thank you carla doing that. The United States, and i want to thank you carla for doing that. [applause] ok. Ok. Thank you very much, now we will have our authors is that right . Ok. Ok . Thank you very much. [applause] please welcome bestselling young adult writer, angelyn [applause] hello, everyone, i am angela on, bear cram, and from the tribe of chippewa indians. I am glad for this honor to speak in these hallowed halls. Everyone has a story. I am always fascinated by the stories behind the stories and my story, i am a debut, i was a debut author at 55, and, yeah. [applause] thank you. The origin story for my story, i was 18 and a senior in high school and my best friend went to a Different School nearby and she told me about a new boy senior year in our classes she thought i might like. I was intrigued and dateless, so yes, i asked about him, and it turned out that he did not play sports, and he hung out with the really hardcore stoners we called them so i never met him, and a month before graduation she said you would never believe it, there was a huge drug bust and it turned out the new boy was an undercover cop. Well, this was a few years before the original 21 jump street. [laughter] and so, i could not believe it. My mind was blown about the idea of a young looking Law Enforcement officer posing as a high school senior, and i was raised on soap operas and mysteries, and so i immediately thought, what if we would have met and what if we would have liked each other, or what if he needed my help, and then the spark that the idea that has stayed with me for 37 years was, why would some undercover drug investigation need the help of an ordinary 18yearold girl. Well, by the time i was 44, i had figured out, i had worked out the puzzle pieces that held the story might happen. What if it was a federal drug investigation onto reservation, and what if this young woman was excellent in chemistry, what if she knew traditional medicines, new her culture and language, and was connected to everybody and everything around her . She actually would be the ideal confidential informant for an fbi investigation. [laughter] well, on my reservation, sometimes the fbi and other federal agencies are not this is serve the good guys so i had to create some plausible ideas of why she would participate, even reluctantly. I decided at age 44 that i could write the worlds worst first draft and live with that failure easier than the regret of never even trying, and so it took 10 years to write a version that i thought was Strong Enough to give me an agent. It got me an agent within two weeks. Two weeks after we went out on submission, there was a 12bidder auction and i sold the u. S. Publishing rights and i am now published in 22 other countries. [applause] but wait, there is more. [laughter] two weeks after the book auction, i sold the film rights to the obamas Higher Ground productions, so, fire keepers daughter, my indigenous nancy drew meets 21 jump street will be coming to netflix at some point. [cheers and applause] i had a mantra while i was writing and it guides my storytelling, that i write to preserve my culture and i edit to protect it. We Indigenous People have always been storytellers but not always the ones getting the book deals. Stories about us, but not by us are more likely to perpetuate stereotypes and in Accurate Information that not only harms native children and teenagers but all students who want, who need to learn about native americans. Everyone has a story, but for too long, our stories, our indigenous knowledge was treated as yet one more resource to be extracted and exploited, just like land, water, timber, and mineral rights. Our stories were mined for trauma without context or nuance and without sharing our strengths and joy. Everyone has a story, lets support indigenous voices telling our stories. [speaking indigenous language] [applause] please welcome new york staff writer, finders for the National Book award, and winter of the Edgar Allan Poe award. [laughter] david i feel like that is how it will all end one day. It is so great to be here amongst such great authors and to be with you over the book festival. I wanted to tell you a quick somewhat eccentric story behind the story but i think it reveals something fundamental about the nature of writing nonfiction and discerning the truth, and it happened in 2004 when i was newly hired as a writer at the new yorker magazine and i was behind on my Contract Party to produce a certain number of stories. As most people know, i am very slow, and i was frantically fearing i might lose this coveted job and i was calling everybody for story ideas. I called a friend who said, well, why dont you look for the giant squid. That would make some news, and my only image becton of a giant squid was from 20,000 leagues under the seat, and i thought it was a myth, but after i got off the phone, i looked it up and sure enough it is a real creature with eyes the size of the human head, tentacles that can stretch as long as a school bus, but no scientist becton had ever seen one alive. These dead carcasses would occasionally float on the surface of the water. I thought, how will you tell that story, there is nothing to see, and i did more digging and lo and behold there are giants squid hunters who have devoted their lives to become the first to document one of these creatures alive, and eventually i found perhaps the most obsessed giant squid hunter of all, a man in new zealand named steve boucher, who had come up with a rather novel scheme. Rather than trying to capture the big calamari, as he put it. [laughter] he was going to try to capture a baby, only the size of the cricket and they grow it in captivity. [laughter] there was a certain mad genius to the scheme, because during certain periods there should be more babies and they should be easier to catch. He called me up and said guess what im going on an expedition so come undone and we will make history. I called my editors and in my desperations i may have committed that sin reported sometimes do which is to oversell a story. I showed him maps with squid migrations and assured that we would be the first to document a baby giant squid and i would even get a photograph. Now even in those flesh days, sending someone to new zealand was expensive but they said, godspeed and send me off. When i arrived in new zealand is when i realized things were on this. First of all things were a mess. First of all, the boat that i thought would be like something in . Stokes turned out to be a skiff with an outboard motor. My fearless squid hunter had bankrupted himself looking for this creature and this is all he had in his group was a graduate student who got seasick, and myself, who he was ready to put to work. [laughter] then he turned to me and said, i should warn you, mate, there is a wee bit of a cyclone coming our way. He was not exaggerating, there was a cyclone coming our way. It was a National Emergency and the power was out and there were Gale Force Winds and i said thats not a problem, we will waited out. He said, no, no, no, the squids only hatched during this time, so we have to go in a bizarre opportunity. So we get in the skiff and its getting dark and he starts to launch the boat in the water and i said, what you doing, its getting dark. He said, oh, oh, giant squids rise at night so we have to go at night so we get off set into deepwater and my the water in my squid hunter, from a diving accident, points to a buoy in the distance and says, what color is that . I said it is green. Cant you see . He said oh, im not just death, i am also colorblind deaf, i am colorblind. And he aims the skiff and all the tumult is flowing through and all i can see in front of me is a mountain of water 20 feet high, then i turn behind me with a flashlight and all i can see is another one in the boat is going like this, and he turns to me and says you wont find this in new york, will you, mate . [laughter] and it wasnt that moment i begin to wonder whether my captain was fully in command of all his faculties, but somehow with his fearless determination, he led us through and out to a spot and we put the traps into the water made of sawed off coke bottles, but thats another story come into the water they go and he puts me to work and im no longer an observer and i have to pull them out and we do this hour after hour to no avail in one night goes by and we do at the next night in the next night still to no avail, and and finally, one time at about 3 00 in the morning, we pull up the traps in the graduate student looks at it and says, i think that is your dream squid. And steve puts his eye right up to the tank and he says, it looks like the scientific name for a giant squid. Sure enough, it was only this big, but i could see a big eye and its tentacles. You have to understand we were tired and exhausted and we had to transfer this sing into another tank, so we are transferring it to another tank and suddenly steve says, where the hell did it go . It is bloody gone. It is a complete catastrophe. He might have swore. He fell back in his chair and had a look of utter despair on his face. You know what i was thinking in that moment . I am dead. I am completely dead. I promise my editor we would get a baby squid and grow it in captivity and we had it and we lost it and i thought, i dont have a story. I have absolutely nothing. It was only after the expedition as i kind of was still wallowing in my own despair and the despair of this poor squid hunter that i realized that that was the story that this was the story about a man, a captain ahab who had devoted his whole life to capturing his whale, and he had it, and he lost it. And it was so much more interesting than this fairytale i concocted in my imagination, and it taught me something so fundamental about the nature of writing some stories and discerning the truth, that you have to keep your eyes open to the story, that you have to be careful about your blinders or your preconceptions or your biases. You have to recognize reality sometimes before you and often the most profound truths in the deepest stories are the ones we are not even looking for. Thank you so much. [applause] please welcome former and writer, rk russell. Rk is this on . [laughter] i would like to start by thanking the folks at the library of congress and all of you being here and allowing me to share the story. I would like to thank my mother raised me as a single black woman america, making her a star. My partner cory obrien who loved me before i knew what it meant to love myself. My manager who believes in me when i feel my talents fall short of opportunity, and the opportunity to write this book and sure this true with whoever may need it. It is an everyday phenomenon to be invited still feel like an outsider. I felt that way being a writer here being with you tonight, though i played arguably one of the toughest sports in america moments like these are more intimidating to me than any nfl game. To be invited but to feel like an outsider is a feeling i have come to know. Stemming from corrupt systems, conflicts and wrongdoings, and so rooted in otherness that it seems possible to be both exceptional and accepted. Whether you are a black man asked to speak in a predominant white space or instead, a black man growing up in the south as i did, the unwelcoming is there. Even in the world of sports where we are bound together by shared uniforms, memorized chance, and through turf, the game seeps with unwelcoming. Through the fields, through the rafters where the jerseys hang in the lockers, those experiencing the worst of that are the trans athletes excluded from participating with the gender they know in their soul to be true. Though i speak of my own experiences and voice concerns for black and lgbtq people at large, i know that unwelcoming transcends race, gender, and sexuality. At one point or another we have all felt like outsiders, whether invited or not. I have to ask myself regardless of these external forces, what it is inside of me that looks for reasons that i do not belong in places i have been invited to or that i live amongst. As a black bisexual man i thought the unwelcoming would be my life companion. It was not until i came out in a personal essay in 2019 as the first nfl player to openly identify as bisexual that i realized i did not need an invitation to belong. When i accepted myself, no one elses acceptance mattered. As i stated before, there is a good reason why so many people feel unwelcome, erased, attacked, whether it be a good tree, antilgbtq legislation, book bands or taking away a womans right to make decisions regarding her own bardi, it is clear for so many of us making feel like our existence is being challenged. But we do not have to carry that around with us everywhere. As writers and authors and storytellers and purveyors of story, we get to redefine acceptance, to show the beautiful parts of our worlds and communities that often dont the shine that they deserve. And we get to talk about the problems we all face together as a society. In writing that coming out essay, i remembered that writing was my first love before for all. Id lost my stepfather very young as a child, and instead of seeking religion or guidance from parents or others, i turned to writing to express my emotions, my feelings and thoughts that even at sixyearold six years old i could not understand myself, i knew that penn understood the words i could not put into words. I felt like a stranger when writing in my journals. I always felt as though i belonged when reading books whether the expense was about someone like me or someone that was different. My memoir is not just an invitation to those who feel like me or look like me, though i hope that people feel seen in people unlike me get to share my experience and create empathy around those topics that for them are so far removed that an invitation is not enough. I hope my book like so many others here today and here this weekend gives people the courage to accept themselves. The thoughts and the mantra we all have a story is true but also something that brings us Unlimited Power in connection. There is no story more valuable than another. There is no existence more prized than another. And though i stand here to date amongst you at this podium today amongst you at this podium, i am in awe of you and the things it takes for us to get together in the society and in this world. I hope to encourage everyone to keep reading, writing, loving, experiencing new expenses whether on the page or inner life and hopefully the courage to allow yourself to feel as welcomed as you are. Thank you. [applause] [cheers and applause] please welcome beverly gage with the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and biography. [applause] beverly thank you. Well, these all are hard asked to follow, but it is a pleasure to be here, especially washington, which is a place i spent a lot of time and did 12 years that i was writing this biography of J Edgar Hoover. Some of you may know that washington was hoovers hometown and he was born here just a few blocks away from where we are right now. He lived here his whole life and died in the city of washington and never worked for anyone but the federal government. It is a particular pleasure to be here though at the library of congress because the library of congress is the place that J Edgar Hoover got his start when he graduated from high school in 1913, having gone to Central High School in washington, which was the most prominent white Public High School in a segregated school system. He needed a job to fund his way through law school at George Washington university and he ended up here at the library of congress. This was a moment of excitement for the library. The new library of congress classification system was just coming into being, and hoover was there as a young man on the cutting edge of this information technology. And it is thanks to the library of congress that he learned to classify things, to organize information, to be administratively efficient and to keep effective files. So [laughter] i really did not want to let this moment pass without saying, thank you library that congress forgiving us J Edgar Hoover. [laughter] now, i will take it from some of the laughter in the audience that this is not a room full of hoover admirers, and i would like to say here at the outset that i myself am not in admirer of J Edgar Hoover. I did not set out to write a biography of hoover because i wanted to redeem him or because i wanted to convince other people to admire him in some way. Very early on when i was just Getting Started writing this biography, i was on a panel with two of my history colleagues at yale who were also writing biographies. One was john gaddis, who was writing a biography of george kennan, the great cold war strategist and thinker. One was david blight, who was writing a biography of frederick douglass, the great abolitionist. And there i was writing a biography of J Edgar Hoover. And, what was interesting to me about that panel was that though we were all engaged in this project called biography, we each had radically different relationships with our subjects. John gaddis was writing about someone he actually knew. Uh, this was a semiauthorized biography. George kennan said go forth and write about me but do it once i am gone but then he proceeded to live to be more than 100 years old. [laughter] so that was a complicated biographical relationship. David blight was writing about someone that he deeply admired, someone he spent his career thinking about, and someone who was among the most admired figures in all of american history, and i had a slightly different problem than that. Uh, which is i was going to write a big about someone who was among the most universally hated figures of the 20th century. I want to say though, that that was one of the things that made me want to write about hoover. He is often portrayed in our public culture, in our Popular Culture as a sort of onedimensional villain, right, this figure who sat in the back room listening in on everyone, pulling strings, manipulating and threatening people, and to be frank, that is a big part of what the book is about because he did a lot of those things. [laughter] but as i began to think about his history, what struck me about how an adequate that image was to understand not only who he was, but the kind of power he will did, how he came to wield that power in the first place, and how he stayed in office for so long. For those of you who are not deep in the hoovers story, i will just offer a few facts. The first is that he was director of the fbi for 48 years. He was there from 1924 to 1972, so just to fill that out a little bit more, he was appointed under calvin coolidge. He then stayed on under herbert hoover, right, the dawn of the great depression. They were not related to their were lots of new stories about it at the time. He was then therefore all three plus terms of Franklin Roosevelts presidency, so he is there through the new deal. He is there altered the second world war. He stays under harry truman. He is there under mccarthyism for the red scare. He stays under Dwight Eisenhower to the 1950s. He is there under john kennedy. He is there under lyndon johnson. And he is there under Richard Nixon and finally dies in may 1972, still in office. So one of the things that really true me to writing about hoover was this amazing sweep of time, the fact that he had his fingers in everything, but also there were important and i think complicated things to say about the changes in the city of washington throughout that period, changes throughout the federal government, in particular, the growth of the federal government and the Security State during that period, in the story about how a simple bureaucrat could wield enough power to shape many many aspects of american politics from our Law Enforcement, law and order politics of the way Law Enforcement is carried out, to its broader politics, constraining as well as sometimes enabling movements like the civil rights movement, like the Antiwar Movement in the 1960s, the Labor Movement and other major social movements of the 20th century. So that is what drew me to hoover and i just want to finish by confessing that i also have a few concerns about whether the world in fact, wanted a big fat biography of J Edgar Hoover. The first of those was that in our polarized moment, hoover does not fit very neatly into political categories that we know. He was a deep believer and the nobility of professional Government Service in nonpartisan service in Career Service that would stand outside the politics, and that is of course most government work going on, something we might call a liberal or progressive government tradition, and he was also a deep ideological conservative, but tickly on questions of race, anticommunism, religion, a whole host of other questions, and what he did is put those two traditions together in a way we did not see reflected in our politics very effectively, i think. So, i wondered if we could in fact have a conversation about this more complicated politics and what it might tell us about the present. My other deep anxiety in these 12 years was you know, as David Rubenstein said, this is not a period in which the 800 page book is a big piece of cultural currency, and so i was a little concerned that in our quick take world that there was not going to be a place for a book like this, and i am enormously grateful and heartened to find that there really is, that there is a whole world of people who want to read this kind of book, and i suspect that the people in this room, a whole world of people who still want to write this kind of book, and i want to finish off by saying that, while we are here at the National Book festival celebrating the library of congress as champions of the book, they are also an amazing archival resource in our champions for the kind of Archival Research that goes into writing the sort of history that i wrote and continue to write that could not be done without these amazing washington institutions, so thank you all for that. [applause] please welcome Pulitzer Prize and National Book critics circle Award Finalist louise alberto [cheers and applause] louise tijuana in the house . It is not only tijuana in the house, but there are american heroes everywhere. There is carla. You are such a hero to all of us, but i want to talk to you about someone else. My mother is in the house. You cant see her. But she is here, i promise you. My mother was a war hero and a book lover. She loved libraries more than anything and the thought that i would be lecturing about her here at the library of congress would have made her mad with joy. So let me tell you a little bit about her. My mother was the only american in my tijuana family. She was also the only person who had come from somewhere really alien than the rest of us. She was from new york city. [laughter] and we did not understand the rules of life in new york city. My mother was born in 1916 and she was raised through the 1920s and 1930s in new york and at a certain point she fled new york and came here to washington dc to be trained to join the red cross and go to world war ii. She was in a group, not nurses, that were known as doughnut dollies, and doughnut dollies are somewhat i need to tell you about as well, as well as about my mother, but just to give you an idea of who she was and how it fell in the dirt street in tijuana where my family lived, she never learned spanish, so she would make it up as she went along. [laughter] [laughter] um, and she had these quirks. I did not know what manhattan was all about. I did not know what it mustve been like in the 30s, the 20s, her family had an antique store on north broadway, and one of their clients was albert einstein, and her uncle went out drinking beer with him and called him al, which to me was kind of cool, but what did i know . And she had, i just want you to see her as best i can before i tell you the story. Um, so, she thought she was a movie star. She was five foot three inches, auburn hair. She had all these affectations left over from the flapper era. Whenever there was a party, including with our mexican family, she would stand in this kind of pose. [laughter] i used to call it the teapot. [laughter] and she would move her hand as she spoke to you, and she liked the jewelry, so she often had a big old ring and she would make a show of it and she also smoked like betty davis for effect, you know. [laughter] so now you are seeing my mother. And if you said something funny, or what she thought was funny, even if it was in spanish and she did not quite understand, she would take a puffin say oh, darling. [laughter] so, she came to washington to train, fleeing a terrible relationship, and uh, i wrote a novel about it. And the novel is good night, irene a novel. People have asked me why did you not write a nonfiction book. I tried, but one of the interesting reasons those women are forgotten is that the reps building for the red cross with all of their information burned down, so they were erased physically, but also culturally. Luis you know, i didnt think it seemed heroic enough to have these brave women driving into combat to help the soldiers, not medical. They drove trucks, about the size of this backdrop. If you cut off two columns and raise it, that was the truck pedro, gmc 2. 5 ton six by truck with a galley on the back with a full kitchen where they made donuts and coffee, and they had a record player so they could play records for the boys fighting in europe. They also ministered to them. They also gave them guidance. They also gave them hope. They also played card games with them. They helped them sometimes when they propound emotionally. Those boys did not know who they could talk to, that that is what my mother did, and you need to know some things about that. She came here and trained. Uh, they left here uh, in a convoy of ships to england. She served troops freshly arrived, took a train from liverpool to london, which was bombed by the germans, got to england and worked on bomber bases in cambridge fire in the northeast of england cambridgeshire in the northeast of england. Attending deposits. There was no record they were there, even the people running the sort of museum space at that airbase. They had no recollection or any proof that those women had lived there and taking care of the soldiers. They landed on utah beach. They joined patton and stormed through western europe. They sought the liberation of paris. They were in the seige they were in the battle of the bulge and followed patton to germany and was they arrived in weimar, they helped to liberate buchenwald. My mother was wounded terribly in a jeep crash in the bavarian alps. So, she kept it quiet. Any of you have veterans and your families probably know this, it is hard to find out. And i did not know. I saw my mother as the flamboyant person. I did not know she was here. I would not have known what to do with that information. But, one day, she had her army footlocker and it was full of stuff and i was told not to ever open it and i promised of course, no way, mom, i would never open it, and she went to work one day and i was like, all right. [laughter] i was going through it and i tried to be careful with everything but i was just flipping out. It was all kinds of army stuff and red cross stuff and pictures of bombers and all this amazing stuff, until i got to the buchenwald folder. And i had no idea what to do with this. What does this have to do with my mom . You know, i did not get it. Um, and i put it all away because this is i dont know, i stepped into something and i dont know what this is. I made it super neat and closed it. She kept a cloth over it, so i covered it with the cloth and i thought i would never say a word. And i am, i am telling you all come off, all my brothers here would just take one thing away from this precision, women are psychic. [laughter] and my mother came home and she said, dear boy you have been in my box. And i said, no, i have not. And she said, did you find any photographs . And i was busted and i said, yeah. And she said, what did you see . And i said, i saw dead people. She said i need to explain that to you, and i will not go into it, but what she said to me, i was ashamed for taking those photographs, but ever since that were ended, i have been ashamed for not taking more. So my mom, by the time i came along, she was married to my dad living on a dirt street in tijuana, really weird to my relatives, my mother served denny, cops cups, and i sure you know was from tijuana has said that, and they would sit there and they would say new [speaking spanish] [laughter] uh, you know, she, she did not reveal things but things came to me later that i realize that so much of the things in our life was her reliving what she did, all through high school was ever a guy i knew was in trouble, she would move him into the house. We always had three or four guys living and she would work and take care that them. My best friend was gay. He was a dancer. We were in the drama world and it was hard times in the 1970s, and she was his champion and she cared for him. That is my mom. And she is here not with us listening to this and i cant thank you enough and i cant think all of you enough for giving her this opportunity, because you know, she was a story lover, and i just want to tell you a little thing that i think may make you understand her debtor. My mother her better. My mother was in a cultural war, 100 mexicans and her. [laughter] and she wanted to make sure that i come to know, could be an american boy too, because she knew that would be a superpower to have both, so she was such a lover of literature that she used literature to win me over. She started reading mark twain to me at night when i was a kid. She followed mark twain with kipling and then she indoctrinated me, i was not ready for it, her hero hemingway, poppa, poppa rules, man. [laughter] and you know, she was right, because i started getting that thing, i wanted to tell stories and write them down and she watched and she watched, and you know i come from a town that never had a Lending Library. Tijuana did not get a Lending Library until when the foundation funded it. So i began to write. I was more more interested and she got a little notebook and i was writing in my notebook, . 69 at the drugstore. I thought, somebody published an empty book. I will fill it. [laughter] and she saw me doing it. I never applied myself to anything. And i had a stack of pages, and i came home from school one day and she was waiting for me. [laughter] dear boy, i have a little present for you, and honest to god i thought, oh man, she got me like a james bond plastic pistol or something, you know . And i went out into the kitchen and she had gotten her world war ii typewriter, cleaned it up, put it on the table with some paper, and i thought, oh, crap, man, typing . She said, seriously, try it. I have paper here. I think youll like it. So i put the paper in and banged it. Boom. Boom. It was so neat. It looked published. I was never going to publish. And you are all young so you probably dont remember this, back when there were typewriters there were ribbons and it was black and red and you could make it whether you want to type in red or black and mine was broken so it was half black and half red. [laughter] i remember thinking, i am on fire, man. This is what my mother was like. I came home a week or two later from school equally disgruntled by school and she said, dear boy, here is another big surprise for you in the kitchen. I said, really . Yes, go see. I went out there and she had sewn my page together and put a cover on it and she said, now you have a book. Yeah. I was a bestselling author in my kitchen. [laughter] [applause] so i just want to say i am so happy she is here, and i am so happy that she is probably going to spend forever hanging around the stacks. And, one weird miracle that has been happening is though the world war ii women have now passed, there were vietnam doughnut dollies, and they have adopted that and there will be some here tomorrow, so if you see them give them a hug and tell them they are heroes. They will be raising hell, so you will know who they are. [laughter] i am just so happy that she is happy. Her name was phyllis, and just so you know, because of the novel, her middle name was irene , so. Thank you. [applause] [cheers and applause]